The invention is concerned with an apparatus for the mechanized and customized preparation of pizzas, particularly for use in self-service restaurants and pizzerias.
Today, pizzas are mostly prepared to order in pizzerias by a pizza-baker who generally, for each pizza, picks up a premixed and leavened portion of dough, spreads it out, and lays it on a baker""s shovel. He then sprinkles the pizza with prepared dressings, such as hashed mozzarella, tomato, anchovies, minced ham and/or other dressings, and finally puts the pizza so prepared into the oven. It can be seen that the preparation of the pizza, though quick, is work-intensive, and compels the pizza-baker to a hard and continuous work over the full opening hours of the restaurant.
In order to reduce the requirements for specialized staff, U.S. Pat. No. 2,190,483 discloses a pizza-making machine where the pizzas are carried on a number of trays which are moved at fixed intervals along a circular path through loaf-flattening station, a seasoning station, a tunnel oven, and finally a pizza-unloading station. Beside being quite complex and costly to manufacture, the machine of U.S. Pat. No. 2,190,483 is also quite rigid in operation, because each of its trays proceeds through the operating cycle in equal steps. Moreover, the trays are led in queue through a tunnel oven while their associated pizzas are baked, adding to the operating rigidity of the machine, since the progression rate of the pizzas under preparation must conform to the dwelling time in the oven. Because of its large number of trays with underlying mechanisms, and because of the poorly accessible tunnel-shaped oven, the machine is also generally difficult to clean. In a similar approach, WO 98/04137 discloses a pizza-making machine having a carrousel structure, and which suffers from the same limitations of operating rigidity, mechanical complexity, high manufacturing cost, and difficult cleaning. The machine of WO 98/04137 includes, however, a distributor of dough loaves.
The main object of the invention is therefore to provide an apparatus for the mechanized preparation of pizzas, by which the pizzas can be prepared and baked on order, without appreciable human help, which is more flexible in operation with respect to known apparatuses, and which is of a simpler and less expensive construction.
Another important aim of the invention is to provide an apparatus for the mechanized preparation of pizzas, which can be cleaned more easily than known means, and which, in general, is more satisfactory from the sanitary viewpoint.
The invention achieves the above and other objects and advantages, such as will appear from the following disclosure, with an an apparatus for the mechanized and customized preparation of pizzas having the features recited in claim 1.